<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<!--

    Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
    or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
    distributed with this work for additional information
    regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
    to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
    "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
    with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

    Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
    software distributed under the License is distributed on an
    "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
    KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
    specific language governing permissions and limitations
    under the License.

-->
</head>
<body>
This API allows to visualize tracking for progress of long lasting tasks.<p>
The usual usecase goes like this:
<br>
<pre>
ProgressHandle handle = ProgressHandle.createHandle("My custom task");
...
// we have 100 workunits
// at this point the task appears in status bar.
handle.start(100);
...
handle.progress(10);
...
handle.progress(50);
...
// at this point the task is finished and removed from status bar
handle.finish();
</pre>
<br>
There are several options on how detailed visualization you want.
<ul>
  <li>task with unknown duration or with hard to show progress steps.</li>
  <li>task with known scaled steps</li>
  <li>task with known steps and also with a time estimate for completion</li>
</ul>
All these usecases are supported by methods of {@link org.netbeans.api.progress.ProgressHandle} class. Additionally
it's possible to include textual information about current progress.
<br>
If the task allows to be cancelled by the user, then you have to implement 
{@link org.openide.util.Cancellable} interface and pass it to the {@link org.netbeans.api.progress.ProgressHandle}
when creating the handle.
</body>
</html>
